During the Trump presidency in the United States of America, the social media network Twitter (now known as X) became a new, unofficial media channel through which the former president issued many political statements and informed the public about planned activities and new decisions. At the same time, however, he also continued to use this venue for more personal information, most frequently somehow connected to his office, for example on the size of his ‘nuclear button’ in comparison to that assumed to be the North Korean leader’s one after a news report. This type of communication was until then unknown as a general communication strategy at least for most public officials. Press conferences and bulletins were the typical means of informing the public and professionally interested parties about the standpoints of the government, its actions and its plans. Also, government information was typically delivered in a rather neutral and down-to-earth tone and was carefully drafted and revised, rather than being spur-of-the-moment ideas frequently dismissing other ideas using direct, sometimes offensive language. It is obvious that the statements of the president of a leading nation and the largest democracy in the world will attract attention. However, the Twitter postings under the Trump presidency attracted more attention than the usual; Trump’s tweets reached millions of followers and generated countless clicks. The criminal proceedings and the impeachment process following the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 were based on the realization and consequently the recognition of the impact of those communicative acts on Trump’s followers.

The 2024 presidential election in the USA demonstrates, with unmistakable clarity, that disinformation (intentionally false information) and misinformation (unintentionally false information disseminated in good faith) pose a real and growing existential threat to democratic self-government in the United States – and elsewhere too. Powered by social media outlets like Facebook (Meta) and Twitter (X), it is now possible to propagate empirically false information to a vast potential audience at virtually no cost. Coupled with the use of highly sophisticated algorithms that carefully target the recipients of disinformation and misinformation, voter manipulation is easier to accomplish than ever before – and frighteningly effective to boot.

This chapter explores digital sovereignty claims in Brazilian activism on Mastodon, the most relevant development of federated social media. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has always advanced digital sovereignty discourses, emphasizing bottom-up struggle for control and autonomy over technology. Federated social media are the open source response to the rise of corporate digital platforms and their proprietary business model. However, most narratives about FOSS struggles, including Mastodon, emerge from the core of the global capitalism. The specific appropriations of digital sovereignty discourses by Mastodon activists in the Global South and, in particular, in the BRICS are still understudied. This is even more relevant because of the history of technological sovereignty in the global periphery, in which bottom-up activism has been much closer to the state than in most FOSS narratives. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and country data, the chapter contributes a nuanced understanding of how Brazilian activists articulate and shape digital sovereignty discourses. It finds out that Brazilian activism represents a step toward the politicization of the FOSS movement, but still attaches little value to the geopolitical dimension of social media struggles, departing from the historical contribution of FOSS activism in the Global South.

Chapter 8 summarizes findings and reviews the implications of previous chapters, including health and safety considerations related to screen time and online interaction. Specifically, it recapitulates guidelines on how to fit gaming and written online interaction into children’s lives in a balanced, principled way, to promote safe, collaborative learning with other children and adults. These guidelines also summarize previously discussed criteria for selecting and setting up appropriate videogame and social media interaction to maximize learning benefits and safety. These include the introduction of developmental guidelines and goals for video games, as there are for children’s books, to provide appropriate scaffolded support for children, including for the development of children’s first and additional languages. Suggestions for conducting further research using conversation analysis in this area are also discussed, to cover a range of similar digital contexts and age groups.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Avishai Margalit’s misrecognition-based theory of political humiliation. For Margalit, humiliation is primarily understood as the culpable denial of self-respect. Margalit notes that political humiliation usually takes one of three forms – removing people from the human community (as when we liken them to animals), the negation of control (as in torture), and ignoring or looking through others. After providing an account of this theory, we argue that Margalit does not sufficiently consider the contagious nature of political humiliation nor the possibility that the feeling might be present even when recognition is offered or, conversely, that we might be humiliated even by those whose recognition we don’t want. We also look at the conceptual differences between humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. We note that despite these clear differences the way these emotions are experienced sometimes feels similar. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the effect of technology and, in particular, social media on the character of contemporary political humiliations.

Smartphones and social media have considerably transformed adolescents’ media engagement. Adolescents consume, create, and share media content anywhere, anytime, and with anyone, often beyond parents’ oversight. Parents try to keep track of their adolescents’ media use by employing control, surveillance, and solicitation. This chapter explores the prevalence and predictors of such monitoring strategies, and their effectiveness in managing adolescents’ media use and shaping the potential consequences of adolescents’ media use for their mental health. In addition, the chapter discusses parents’ use of digital media for monitoring adolescents’ nonmedia activities, such as the use of location-tracking applications. Overall, evidence regarding the prevalence, predictors, and effectiveness of parental media monitoring is limited and inconclusive. The chapter underscores the need for refining conceptualizations of media monitoring. Moreover, it highlights the importance of understanding the effectiveness of media monitoring within an ever-evolving digital world.

Ever since the 1960s, Russophone professional and lay authors have been leaving the printed page and climbing onto other – and, with time, online – platforms, and pairing words with (moving) images with fervour. How should we define their activities? How should we assess their visual and digital experiments? Can a social-media entry in verse by a poet be considered literature? To what extent can the text-oriented tools of traditional literary studies help us unpack GIF-laden online stories? And how do understandings of literature as a highbrow cultural practice help us to understand social-media odes to classics by teenagers? This chapter follows the forms that Russophone literary activities have taken beyond print outlets, paying special attention to digital-writing forms. It surveys literary production across websites, social media, and other digital platforms from the mid−1990s to the early 2020s by authors including Olia Lialina, Roman Leibov, Linor Goralik, Dmitrii Vodennikov, and Galina Rymbu.

The focus of this chapter is on how language policies are resisted. The chapter begins by articulating in a theoretical and practical way what resistance to language policy looks like, particularly from a discursive point of view. It concludes with a case study of resistance to language policy in an online forum for non-local teachers of English in Thailand, highlighting the entanglements between resistance to limits on what ‘named languages’ could be used and a broader struggle to overcome a hegemonic racial ideology around the concept of ‘native speaker’.

This chapter discusses the different subgroups of Sanhe gods – day laborers, job intermediaries, and gambling dogs – and their experiences of becoming precarious to varying degrees. It also explores the space of the urban village that sustains the everyday life of Sanhe gods, providing them with food, shelter, clothing, showering, pawning, and other types of goods and services. It ends with a discussion on the subculture of Sanhe gods and its presence on the internet.